It is hard to imagine an odder cinematic alliance than that between Michael Winner and Alan Ayckbourn. Winner is a bluff, extroverted film director whose output includes the three blood-spattered "Death Wish" movies and whose definition of teamwork is "a lot of people doing what I say." Ayckbourn is a genially diffident dramatist and theater director who writes painful comedies and who once said he likes to lead from way behind. But Winner is filming Ayckbourn's 1985 hit play,...

* "Life of Riley" has premiere at Berlin Film Festival * French film is adaptation of British play about three couples By Sarah Marsh BERLIN, Feb 10 (Reuters) - At 91-years-old, veteran French filmmaker Alain Resnais shows no sign of letting up his experimentation, drawing on theatre, graphic illustration and cinema in his whimsical comedy "Life of Riley" that premiered at Berlin's festival on Monday. In his third adaptation of a play by...

By Benedict Nightingale, New York Times News Service | August 10, 1989

Almost 20 years ago, Alan Ayckbourn became the artistic director of the tiny repertory theater in this sedate Yorkshire seaside town. Thirty years ago, he joined it as an assistant stage manager, aspiring actor and occasional writer. And 50 years ago, there occurred a still more significant incident in the Ayckbourn almanac: the dramatist-to-be was born. No wonder there's a celebratory mood at his Stephen Joseph Theater this summer. In their eagerness to...

Only the vivacious die young, notes one character in Alain Resnais ' " Life of Riley ," while "the tiresome, humdrum ones live forever. " But if that's true, then surely Resnais himself is the exception that proves the rule. Turning for the third time to the work of British playwright Alan Ayckbourn ("Private Fears in Public Places"), whose highly theatrical comedies of manners have made good matches for Resnais' consuming interest in form as a vessel for character...

"Communicating Doors," the 46th and quite surprising work in Alan Ayckbourn's redoubtable career as England's master of contemporary comic drama, made its American debut Wednesday night in the Merle Reskin Theatre as a major offering of the International Theatre Festival. Almost from the beginning of his work 35 years ago, Ayckbourn has been fascinated by the possibilities of manipulating time and space within the framework of the theater. Clever from the word go, he also developed as the years...

Gardens can be dangerous places for women. Consider Eve, tricked by a snake. And then there's Susan, undone by a rake. The heroine of Alan Ayckbourn's "Woman in Mind" has concussed herself in the most cliched way possible by stepping on the wrong side of a garden implement. Like Samuel Beckett's Krapp slipping on the banana peel, Susan's undignified pratfall is symptomatic of a larger inability to control fate - or to accept responsibility for making a better life. But...

In the middle of last summer, Alan Ayckbourn experienced a thrill that few playwrights of the Western world have ever felt. His two linked comedies, "House" and "Garden," were playing simultaneously in the two large theaters that share the central lobby of the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain in London. Since both shows start at the same time and finish exactly 2 hours and 15 minutes later, their separate audiences, some 2,000 people all told,...

If you're of the view that adults getting together with family for the festive season usually behave like children, then Alan Ayckbourn's "Season's Greetings" will offer a few confirmatory laughs. Herein, an extended family of middle-class Brits get together for some quality time together over Christmas and Boxing Day, only for things to devolve into a farcical mix of adolescent husbands, authoritarian seniors, neurotic singles and at least one tipsy married woman behaving...

Three hours by rail from London and a brisk five-minute walk from the train station lies the artistic home of the playwright who in England is exceeded in popularity only by William Shakespeare. Alan Ayckbourn, the amiable, articulate, slightly paunchy and pleasantly rumpled man who holds this distinction (judging from the number of productions his plays receive each year), raises an eyebrow and waves aside an imaginary annoyance when he is reminded of this. "I'll be more pleased," he says, "if...

I think that the most uttered line on the English stage is not "to be or not to be," but, "I'm going into the garden." Whether one is seeing Noel Coward, Agatha Christie, Alan Ayckbourn or even Harold Pinter, more often than not, the set employs a posh English drawing room of some sort, with French doors leading to an off-stage garden. Sooner or later, one of the characters announces he or she is going there, and does. Sometimes, a character in tennis togs enters from the...

By Lawrence Bommer. and Lawrence Bommer is a free-lance theater writer | February 18, 1993

The worst thing about the absent friends in "Absent Friends" is that they're present. An early work by the cunning British dramatist Alan Ayckbourn, this dark 1974 comedy depicts five London suburbanites who gather to console their chum Colin over the drowning of his fiance. As it turns out-a tad too neatly-Colin was a lot happier in his near-marriage than they are in their faithless and bored "complete" ones. Far from craving their smug condolences, Colin, serene and...

Despite his widespread reputation as the English Neil Simon, the prolific playwright Alan Ayckbourn actually forges comedies that are rooted firmly in pain -- especially the suffering of the married, the meek and the middle-class. For more than four decades, Ayckbourn has served as the comic confessor of the poor souls trapped in loveless marriages inside English subdivisions and bedsits (studio apartments). As they hop out of each other's bedrooms, losing trousers and dignity with every tumble,...

Alan Ayckbourn, ever the ingenious writer of stage comedies, in recent years has increasingly turned his attention to the pain that lies just beneath the laughter of his plays on the foibles of the English middle class. "Woman in Mind," his 1986 London hit, still has a good supply of funny moments, filled as it is with his customary assortment of incompetents and pea-brains; and as usual, the play is very inventive in its manipulation of theatrical time and space. But...

Along with remarkable dexterity for funny dialogue, the English playwright Alan Ayckbourn has long displayed an astonishing ability to manipulate dramatic form for comic purposes. In his sidesplitting early play "How the Other Half Loves," one split-screen room on a stage simultaneously represents two houses. "Communicating Doors" is a play that revolves around, well, doors. And, most recently, "House" and "Garden" present the same story from both inside and exterior...

The new Goodman Theatre's series of inaugural celebrations peaks with a 26-hour open house, free and open to the public, that starts at 5 p.m. Friday. Centerpiece of the festivities is an 8 p.m. Friday special (and the tickets are already gone) edition in the large Albert Ivar Goodman theater of the Milly's Orchid Show revue, produced and presided over by performance artist Brigid Murphy, featuring such guest stars as Blue Man Group, monologist David Cale, actress/author Regina Taylor,...

Chicago's mini-fest of Alan Ayckbourn comedies, launched last month with the American premiere at Goodman Theatre of his "House" and "Garden," continues apace with a revival of his '70s play, "Absurd Person Singular," by the small, off-Loop Wing & Groove Theatre Company. First produced in England in 1972, fairly early in Ayckbourn's now-60-play career, this comedy of social upheaval and domestic disaster bears a title that, Ayckbourn has stated, "was originally intended for...

Along with remarkable dexterity for funny dialogue, the English playwright Alan Ayckbourn has long displayed an astonishing ability to manipulate dramatic form for comic purposes. In his sidesplitting early play "How the Other Half Loves," one split-screen room on a stage simultaneously represents two houses. "Communicating Doors" is a play that revolves around, well, doors. And, most recently, "House" and "Garden" present the same story from both inside and exterior...

The latest production from Wicker Park's Wing & Groove Theatre, "ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR," is an early work by Alan Ayckbourn, whose "House" and "Garden" are currently playing both Goodman Theatre stages. The Wing & Groove presentation, a scalpel-sharp play, depicts three cunningly contrasted British couples at three successive parties -- past, present and future -- in three suburban kitchens. Trapped in rancid marriages, these six love-seekers inhabit -- and at times infest -- Ayckbourn's trenchant...

Egos in collision in a British country home: It's the perfect formula for a histrionic sparkler called "HAY FEVER." Noel Coward's 1925 masterwork is based on the actress Laurette Taylor and her motley family. Celebrating the eccentricity of a life upon the wicked stage, the Bliss family is larger than life. Four unexpected guests arrive, each hoping for a romantic weekend with a particular Bliss. Opening Saturday and starring local thespian royalty Paula Scrofano and John Reeger, Gary Griffin's...